Staged Quotes

He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-will reaction to such a holocaust. The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robots anywhere who didn't have a part to play. Harold Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow robots. They were fueled by rice. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Dana daydreamed of one day being able to set her agenda at B.Altman with the same courage and tenacity as the woman who was now driving the VW while speaking animatedly about her travel plans for the near future. She would be journeying to India in search of exotic merchandise for the store's Indian extravaganza, a lavish event planned by Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello to compete with Bloomingdale's Retailing as Theater movement. The movement was the brainchild of Bloomingdale's Marvin Traub, who staged elaborate presentations such as China: Heralding the Dawn of a New Era. Typical extravaganzas featured fashion, clothing, food, and art from various regions of the world.
"I'll bring back enough items to make Bloomingdale's blush!" Nina said confidently. "And I'm not just talking sweaters, hats, and walking sticks. I'll stop first in the Himalayas and prowl the Landour Bazaar."
Lynn Steward ~ A Very Good Life ~ Lynn Steward

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich - being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. ~ Romain Gary

There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy? ~ Lady Gaga

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, a votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself. The same holds for the linguistic work. In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people's saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave. ~ Martin Heidegger

it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others ~ Andrew Klavan

Claudette Colbert was not Hollywood's greatest beauty, but her trim little figure, round, kitten-like face, and obviously intelligent good humor made her a bit of a sex symbol, much to her own surprise. By 1934 she'd adopted the hairstyle she kept for life: a short, auburn bob with a fringe of bangs. Although a partygoer and social animal, Claudette was also known as a tough-as-nails professional, overseeing her lighting and camera angles. Her right profile was known as "the dark side of the moon," and scenes had to be staged so as not to show it. She was also self-conscious about her short neck - directing her in a 1956 TV show, Noël Coward reportedly snapped, "If only Claudette Colbert had a neck, I'd wring it!" "When it comes to details, I'm a horror," she admitted cheerfully, though downplaying the profile story. "Why not have your good side showing? ~ Eve Golden

During the boisterous years of my youth nothing used to damp my wild spirits so much as to think that I was born at a time when the world had manifestly decided not to erect any more temples of fame except in honour of business people and State officials. The tempest of historical achievements
seemed to have permanently subsided, so much so that the future appeared to be irrevocably delivered over to what was called peaceful competition between the nations. This simply meant a system of mutual exploitation by fraudulent means, the principle of resorting to the use of force in self-defence being formally excluded. Individual countries increasingly assumed the appearance of commercial undertakings, grabbing territory and clients and concessions from each other under any and every kind of pretext. And it was all staged to an accompaniment of loud but innocuous shouting. This trend of affairs seemed destined to develop steadily and permanently. Having the support of public approbation, it seemed bound eventually to transform the world into a mammoth department store. In the vestibule of this emporium there would be rows of monumental busts which would confer immortality on those profiteers who had proved themselves the shrewdest at their trade and those administrative officials who had shown themselves the most innocuous. The salesmen could be represented by the English and the administrative functionaries by the Germans; whereas the Jews would be sacrificed to the unprofita ~ Adolf Hitler

Hinduism ... gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the God ward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Santana Dharma ... ~ Sri Aurobindo

Fifteen per cent of the population believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party ~ Al Gore

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Lives are staged from within. ~ Simon Van Booy

They leaned over and scooped up handfuls of salt. The police tried to forcibly remove the salt from their hands. A crowd of dissidents ran onto the beach, picked up salt, and were taken away by the police. The protests went on for days, with waves of salt makers followed by waves of police followed by more salt makers. The police called in reinforcements. Soon the jails were filled, and more and more police and protesters were rushing into Inchuri. The police staged charges, harmless but designed to scare. It didn't work. ~ Mark Kurlansky

On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight ... I can remember other bug fights we staged later on ... They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Andropov's concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The ~ Eric Schlosser

The plan is to engineer events, real and staged, that will create enormous fear in the countdown years to 2012. This includes a plan to start a third world war either by stimulating the Muslim world into a "holy war" against the West or by using the Chinese to cause global conflict. Maybe both. ~ David Icke

I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some will never be famous. But they are all my friends. ~ Jonas Mekas

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. ~ Bob Dylan

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings. ~ Walter Isaacson

When I staged the play and narrated my story to the audience, people found it amazing that after facing so many hardships, I have gone on to do 482 films. ~ Anupam Kher

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings. ~ Denis Healey

It's so not sexy and intimate. There are 40 people in the room. There's a guy with his belly hanging out, with a boom in your face. It's really very technical. I think doing a love scene is tougher than doing a fight scene. It's so staged and you can't put light on her face and you have to hit the mark. ~ Boris Kodjoe

With Albright at the helm of the State Department, Osama bin Laden ran wild throughout the Middle East, the North Koreans began feverishly building nukes under her nose, and we staged a pre-emptive attack solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people by Albright about a world leader who was not an imminent threat to the United States. Slobodan Milosevic wasn't even a latent, long-term, hypothetical threat. ~ Ann Coulter

Contemplative love seeks a heroic deed that can be accomplished without delay and in full view of everyone. Indeed, some people are even ready to lay down their lives as long as the process is not long drawn out but takes place quickly, as though it were being staged for everybody to watch and applaud. Active love, on the other hand, is unremitting hard work and tenacity, and for some it is a veritable science. But ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy. ~ Terence McKenna

I've come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, ~ James C. Collins

The architecture of the Colisseum and other places of Roman entertainment are difficult to judge without recalling what purpose they served. It was here that gladiators fought to the death; that prisoners of war, convicts and Christians were devoured by as many as 5,000 wild beasts at a time; and that voctims were crucified or burned alive for the entertainment of Roman civilization. When the Romans screamed for ever more blood, artificial lakes were dug and naval battles of as many as 19,000 gladiators were staged until the water turned red with blood. The only emperors who did not throw Christians to the lions were the Christian emperors: They threw pagans to the lions with the same gusto and for the same crime-having a different religion. ~ Petr Beckmann

In just 20 years terrorism, communications, the jet plane and the increase of wealth and knowledge have forced, to varying degrees, world leaders into a haunted and secret peerage whose links with the people they guide are meticulously cleansed and staged. ~ Hugh Sidey

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged
where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only. ~ Philip Roth

Bombs were not just weapons. They were something more, expressions of the bomber's thoughts about you, his predictions of your behavior - what you would see, even what you would think and feel. He'd staged a presentation designed to fool you. He didn't even know your name, but you were the one he was really after. Bombs were acts of murder, but they were also jokes on you, riddles the bomber hoped were too tough for you, chances for you to pick wrong when it was almost impossible to pick right. ~ Thomas Perry

The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing while also being seen, and no doubt it was only in the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

The word 'theatrical' makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural. ~ Zola Jesus

Before I decided to concentrate on writing, I drew pictures and painted, and made Super 8 experimental movies. I was the singer in three rock bands, and I wrote and staged and acted in plays for kids in my neighborhood. So I was kind of all over the place in my interests and far-flung in terms of where my creativity wanted to end up. ~ Dennis Cooper

Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian 'war' and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought.

"But there's still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them--we who called down the sacred lightning of 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket. ~ Thomas Pynchon

But even if all of us meet terrible ends, something happened on that stage tonight that can't be undone. We victors staged our own uprising, and maybe, just maybe, the Capitol won't be able to contain this one. ~ Suzanne Collins

Thus these three amendments to the Constitution [13th, 14th, 15th] were ratified while the ten Southern states were under martial law, and "had no law at all." The Force Acts, the four Reconstruction Acts, and the Civil Rights Act were all passed by Congress while the Southern states were not allowed to hold free elections, and all voters were under close supervision by federal troops. Even Soviet Russia has never staged such mockeries of the election procedures. ~ Eustace Mullins

Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and forceps soon thereafter); previously, "childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded." Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, "attention was focussed on the 'population' as fundamental category for economic and political analysis." The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to this crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context - that is, as the breeding of labor power. A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the "black man" - a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterevolution. ~ Peter Linebaugh

Because if one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage -not a convenient place for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or a staged lecture or a staged story- then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances. ~ Peter Brook

Essentially, the whole time I'd been here, the security staff hadn't been paid. I would have been harassing the management too, though I probably would have started with a discussion and not so much jumping straight to peeing on someone's bed. You have to work up to that sort of thing. Still, I had essentially staged a hostile takeover, which did kind of explain why they'd been going on the offensive. ~ Lish McBride

Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we're in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won't form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films. ~ Chris Palmer

I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged. ~ Stephen Sondheim

The world is a drama, staged in a dream ~ Guru Nanak

The importance of rehearsal is maybe you want to talk about how the scene's going to be designed, how it's going to be staged, all of those things. It's all about preparation, and deciding what mutually you don't want to do, rather than necessarily what you do. ~ Sam Mendes

I wish writing were really like the way Andy staged it here: Me in a mania at a desk while a group of people stand around cheering in awe. More realistically, it's me pooping around on Twitter until I get an idea. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Nothing is staged exactly as it was, because I can't remember - and I consider that an advantage. ~ Harold Prince

There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience. ~ Wole Soyinka

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them. ~ Roger Ebert

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves.
"Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends. ~ Heather Havrilesky

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed. ~ Susan Sontag

I got kicked out in grade school because I staged a riot because I wanted more library time. ~ Bitsie Tulloch

People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn't know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband? ~ Maureen Johnson, Truly Devious

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well? ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women; it made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a "young woman American slave" to the highest bidder. Her ad said that she was "not beautiful, but very attractive," and that she had "features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine. ~ Anonymous

By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. ~ Thomas Merton

I never staged a coup. They picked me up. Like I say, they forced me to become premier, maybe hoping that by that way, they send me to the electric chair. ~ Nguyen Cao Ky

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. ~ Susan Sontag

One of my fave TV shows is Into the Badlands because martial arts staged well and magically and saturated colours and eye candy and coherent plot and world building. It has a strong diverse cast. ~ Justine Larbalestier

Wallace had read the Tractatus, of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was "the most beautiful opening line in western lit"). He knew that Wittgenstein's book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus, its cold, formal, logical picture of the world cold make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened-a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson's novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, "What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?" Pronouncing the novel "a kind of philosophical sci-fi," Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had "fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein's doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness. ~ James Ryerson

Because to watch would be to understand the play isn't being staged for us. ~ Victor LaValle

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong. ~ Terry Zwigoff

Local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged "player interviews," that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as "like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled, ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world. ~ Eknath Easwaran

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty. ~ Thomas Griffith

Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of ... less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
'Think of that. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The deepwood is vanished in these islands
much, indeed, had vanished before history began
but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history. ~ Robert Macfarlane

The press heralded this as a major accomplishment. The rush from the press as soon as it was announced suggested a high level of coordination. Like lemmings in a staged dive off a cliff, 'historic' became the media's rallying cry. There is nothing historic about the deal. In fact, news reports from November 2012 noted that China expected, in 2012, that its carbon emissions would begin to decline after 2030 because of factory upgrades, efficiencies, etc. ~ Erick Erickson

Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

Tragedy springs from its own peculiar sorcery, with treachery, born of envy or ambition, a usual instigator. Treachery is apparent only after the events staged are well over, as we know, its victims dead, or living and smarting under its tricks, realizing too late how they have been misused: if indeed they are ever cognizant of its role, if still players, to this wonder and rue. Most unacceptable is its subtlety, the double-face which double-deals, the Iago perpetrators hidden for decades, smiling the smiles of polite and not so polite society. They nod and wave, heroes to many; sly politicians these Claudiuses. Time favours the Macbeths and forgets the maligned. The former enjoy live, some even oblivious to their lies as being lies, for they prefer to bask in blessings, aping the certainties of creed, cheating death and duty while in pavilions of ease. They succeed on their success, trite or vast; wealth for some, and enviably, fame for the few. The unaware, their victims, float off to obscurity on ruptured vessels of injustice to theater lands unknown, never really knowing why, if the job's done property. Normality is, truthfully, life's whore, readily embraced and conveniently embracing; secretly, it has the clap. Thinking of plot should then give pause. The treacherous cheat fate and re-write, their 'intended history'. Call it fate. They become authors of an illicit story, penmen of their own gods, living their own fresh creation through a new, egregious, utilitarian dram ~ Barnaby Allen

In reality, "reality TV shows" are staged and scripted. ~ Robert Black

Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled. ~ Jerry Saltz

Life has been fair, destiny may have staged it well but the timings were terrible. ~ Parul Wadhwa

The civil war in Rwanda and other ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives. ~ Michel Chossudovsky

You should never reward stupidity, unless, of course, it was staged in the first place. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

There were early mornings–"zero dark thirty," as they were called–when a special operations helicopter would appear, 300 feet from his quarters. These were UH-60 Blackhawks, which staged on the taxiway far from the rest of the camp. The crews waited in the middle of the night, engines and rotors engaged, until they were called in for a raid as part of a task force so secretive that even its designation was classified. ~ Cate Folsom

I close my eyes and hear wind rushing through palm trees again. And then laughter. The scene is foggy at first, and then it comes into sharp focus. I am standing in a kitchen. It's one of those big, well-appointed spaces you see in magazines, but this one is well loved, not just staged. A cake bakes in the oven. Carrot. There are matches and a box of birthday candles at the ready by the stove. Stan Getz's smoky-sweet saxophone filters from a speaker somewhere nearby. I'm stirring a pot of marinara sauce; a bit has splattered onto the marble countertop, but I don't care. I take a sip of wine and sway to the music. A little girl giggles on the sofa. I don't see her face, just her blond ponytail. And then warm, strong arms around my waist as he presses his body against me. I breathe in the scent of rugged spice, fresh cotton, and love. ~ Sarah Jio

In 2011 India's Test team was crowned as world cricket's leading side for the first time in its history. The foundations for this global domination can be traced to a decade earlier, when a career-defining performance by VVS Laxman helped to turn a whole series on its head as India, in the face of a seemingly unassailable deficit, staged an unbelievable recovery to go on and overpower what many considered to be the finest cricket team ever assembled. ~ Dave Wilson

I stand by this man (President George W. Bush). I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound.. with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. ~ Stephen Colbert

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer ... but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper. ~ Silas House

If the proper preparations have been made and the necessary precautions taken, any staged event is guaranteed success
Ethelred The Unready ~ Robert Asprin

One opal cloudlet in an oval form reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm which in a distant valley has been staged for we are most artistically caged. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu. ~ David Mamet

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius ('nobody's land'), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.
In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of 'a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]'. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn't exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter 'p' does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, 'f' stands for 'p', and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.) ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Whoever lives like me doesn't die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without him being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That's all, and we call it nothing; but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause, for we don't even know for sure if it's nothing, we, these vegetable manifestations of both truth and life, dust on both the outside and the inside of the panes, grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a new bright ornament upon the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of Cain. The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross; before the cross it bows and toward the cross it points with carefully staged histrionics
but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear. ~ A.W. Tozer

The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) andsets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context. ~ Bertolt Brecht

He and Helen spent the rest of the winter there, seeing friends and promoting his cigars. He staged one stunt in which he smoked three cigars at one time. ~ Wilborn Hampton

When you begin to walk your own journey, to have your own unique conversation, you will naturally stop feeling envious of others. Not because you'll realize your desires are different from theirs, but because they are so similar. You'll discover the difference between doing well and pretending to do well, between being happy and pretending to be happy, between healthy relationships and staged ones. You'll see just how many obstacles lie on any path. You'll realize that it takes the same amount of effort to work on building up the quality of the conversations in your life as it does to broadcast to the public, constantly, that those conversations are already perfect. You can either build up the mask or build up the authentic self. And you, brave and beautiful you, will make the right choice eventually. Be it now or on your deathbed. We all realize soon enough. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected. ~ Rene Girard

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now. ~ Al Gore

Truth is, we all project a false front to the world, peppering our social media pages with witty words and silly emoticons. Life narrowed down to 140 characters, staged selfies, and tirades over opinion posts. Life lived for the approval of the masses, all while tearing strangers down for the slightest misstep. ~ Kristen Callihan